Housebreaking
by Checkerboards
Summary: The sequel to 'Beach House'. All play and no work makes for a very bored supervillain. Is Gotham's newest henchgirl ready for her first heist?
1. Agility

Every job has its drawbacks. Professional athletes, men and women paid millions to play their favorite games, ended up with broken bones and permanent injuries. Fiercely brilliant scientists, dedicated to their life's work of chemistry, often found themselves dying from the side effects caused by the elements that they had been the first to discover. Even the job of parenting was not immune from its own brand of horror, from the awful smell of baby formula all the way down to the depths of diaper finger-painting.

The job of henchgirl to the Riddler seemed relatively easy in comparison. Wear a green dress? Simple. Hobnob with master criminals? Less simple, but certainly doable. Match wits with the Batman? She'd done it and escaped scot-free three times in a row! And if that was all it took to be a henchgirl, life would have been pretty good. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

Every job's drawbacks appear sooner or later, and in this case, they'd appeared this morning, when a slight tickle on her neck roused her out of a sound sleep. She cracked an eyelid, noting that her field of vision was completely blocked by a mischievous set of eyes, and promptly snuggled further under the blankets.

The warm, cozy softness of the blankets abruptly disappeared. Jackie groaned and stuffed her head under the pillow, which was promptly yanked away. "Rise and shine, pumpkin. Ready for your first heist?"

"Can I have coffee first?" Jackie mumbled.

"Coffee later. Up! Up! **Whither a bed, mostly regret**!"

Jackie glared at him through one sleep-crusted eye. "It's too early for anagrams," she grumbled. She shut her eyes, mentally shifting letters around with the ease of someone who had had five months of daily anagram-solving to sharpen her wits. "And anyway, the early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."

Her backside hit the floorboards with a thump. "Vacation's over," he advised, letting her ankle fall to the ground. "We've got work to do. Up!"

* * *

They say that creativity goes hand in hand with messiness. If that was the case, then the Riddler was definitely the premier creative mind inside Gotham City. The hall closet of his showplace lair gaped open, revealing one hundred and seventy-five cubic feet of space stuffed with anything a criminal could ever desire. Among the piles, barely visible, the Riddler sifted and sorted through his treasures, accompanying his search with a stream-of-consciousness mutter sprinkled with more anagrams.

Jackie sat outside the closet, perched uncomfortably on the arm of the green question-marked couch. A cup of coffee - her third this morning - steamed warmly in her hands. She had a feeling that even lethal levels of caffeine wouldn't get her nearly as perky as a pre-heist Riddler. She took a long drink anyway, half-hoping that he'd never find whatever he went in there to get. If it was that important to the heist, maybe they wouldn't be able to steal things without it...

She sighed. They were running out of money, and Eddie had been talking about nothing else but Batman and outsmarting him since they'd gotten back home. Even if he didn't find whatever-it-was, she'd be willing to bet that he'd find a substitution and have them out and about as soon as possible.

The human body makes a lot of distinctive noises when it collides with stationary objects. Elbows, for example, particularly elbows that have been shattered and painstakingly repaired, tend to crack and pop alarmingly when trying to balance the weight of a suddenly-falling metal chest full of question-marked knickknacks.

"Is everything all right in there?"

"Fine," Eddie called. There was a thudding crash, as if a box of glassware had fallen down a fire escape. "**Oh, bacon fist**," he swore. Something else rattled ominously in the depths of the mess.

"Uh, Eddie? There aren't any deathtraps in there, are there?"

The bobbing green hat paused for a moment. "No..." Eddie said thoughtfully. "No, I don't think so." The hat ducked downward, disappearing behind a large cardboard box marked "HATS, GLOVES, PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES". "Ah-ha!"

A cloud of dust emerged from the closet, followed closely by the Riddler, clutching a green metal box in his arms. He ceremonially placed it on the coffee table and clicked the latches open. The lid rose smoothly on its own, revealing a gun laying on a custom-made bed of foam.

If the Emerald City had muggers, they'd carry guns like this. Silver, green, and black metal twined around one another in geometric patterns and swirled over each other in tiny, gleaming question marks. "Here," Eddie said, scooping it up and passing it to Jackie.

She nearly dropped it on her foot. She hadn't realized that guns were so _heavy_. In movies, they seemed to be weightless. Tentatively, she curled her hand around the...whatever you called it...the handle?...and examined it a little closer.

"Here's the holster," Eddie added, dangling a complicated-looking arrangement of leather straps in the air between them. "Go ahead, try it on!"

Jackie gladly set the gun back in the box and took the straps. Whoever had designed it had been quite clever, since the straps themselves were formed in arcs and whirls that probably looked like question marks once they were in position. However, they'd neglected to add any handy little instructions with it to help the wearer figure out how to get into the thing.

Eddie watched her fumbling with the straps for a few minutes. "Haven't you ever worn a holster before?"

She gave him an exasperated look through her cage of leather. "Eddie, I've never even held a gun before!"

He blinked. "Really?"

"Really."

"I just thought that - well, your mom said that she went to the shooting range all the time..."

"Well, I'm not my mother!"

"And I'm extremely thankful for that," he smiled. He looked her over for a moment, tapping his forefinger thoughtfully on his lips as he examined her. Then, all pensiveness gone, he flashed her an excited smile. "Let's go for a little ride." He yanked her coat from the closet and tossed it at her. She stuck an arm between the holster's straps just in time to snag it before it hit the floor. By the time she'd gotten the tangled holster off, the Riddler was already in his own coat and heading for the door.

"Where are we going?"

"You'll see!" he said, with an enigmatic quirk to his eyebrow. With a blast of cold air, he disappeared into the snow. He popped his head back in just long enough to say "And bring the gun!" before vanishing again.

Jackie stuffed her arms into her coat and shrugged it on, muttering to herself as she hauled the heavy metal gun case toward the door. Eddie sure loved secrets for a man who couldn't seem to keep his mouth shut about what crimes he was about to commit. Still, at least they weren't on their way to the heist right now...she hoped. Well, he made sure to tell Batman and the cops whenever he stole anything - surely he'd tell her, too.

Eddie remained maddeningly silent on the short drive through town. As they headed deeper into the warehouse district, he began to hum a cheerful little tune, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. "Ba da daaaa...ba da daaaa...aaah! Here we are." He turned the car off and slipped outside, trotting to the worn, ancient door as if he was a child on his way to see Santa Claus.

Jackie slammed her car door shut and followed him, high heels slipping in the snow as she tried to balance the ungainly weight of the gun case in her arms. One of these days, she was going to have to replace her tennis shoes.

Eddie rat-tatted on the door. After a slight pause, it creaked open to reveal a shortish man with a long braided ponytail gnawing on an enormous turkey leg. "Carlos!" Eddie said. "Leftovers for breakfast?"

"Nah. Made it just now. Want some?" He hiked a turkey-greased thumb over his shoulder. Inside, they could see a rickety card table atop which a beautifully browned thirty-pound turkey rested on an enormous silver platter. "Got plenty."

"No thanks. This is Carlos," Eddie said, turning to Jackie. "Carlos, this is Query."

Carlos wiped his free hand on his apron - an apron, Jackie noted, that was nothing more than a mechanic's jumpsuit tied around his neck by the arms - and grabbed her hand in a firm handshake. "A new one?" he asked Eddie, eyebrow raised.

Eddie cleared his throat. "Yes. A new one," he repeated.

Without releasing her hand, Carlos looked her up and down much like Eddie had earlier. Jackie stiffened slightly as he stared at her. "Huh," he finally said, letting go of her. "You sure?" he said, turning back to Eddie.

"I'm sure," he said, a slight edge on his words.

Jackie did her best to smile politely through the cloud of uncertainty enveloping her head. Something was clearly going on that she was not involved in. She shifted the weight of the gun case in her arms and surreptitiously kicked a clump of snow off of the top of her foot.

Eddie cleared his throat again. "Ah. Query? Carlos and I need to discuss some things. If you could excuse us for a moment?"

Jackie glanced out the door to the car, which was rapidly being buried in flurries of snowflakes. "Oh, come in, come in," Carlos invited, hastily stepping out of the doorway so they could enter. "You can wait through there." He gestured with his turkey leg at a door to the left, a solid-looking door painted gunmetal gray.

She opened it up and peered inside. The door led to a hallway floored with expensive-looking hardwood and outfitted at her end with a pair of ornate spindly chairs that wouldn't look amiss in a museum exhibit. A coat rack stood elegantly between them. She stepped inside and let the door close behind her with a muted click as she rested the heavy gun case gently in one of the fancy chairs. Her bright green coat, spangled with tiny question marks, looked more than a little ridiculous on the highly polished wooden stand. She turned around, wondering if the door on this side was just as pretty as the rest of the furnishings. It was disappointingly gray, just like the other side. Even the handle was...she blinked, running disbelieving fingers over the smooth paint.

There was no handle on this side.

Well...surely Eddie wouldn't take her anywhere that wasn't safe...would he? She considered the last five months of her life, which had included a month-long vacation with a frequently homicidal and emotionally unstable villain, an invitation to a party that he was robbing, and countless trips to the Iceberg Lounge, where this year's hottest accessory was a police file six inches thick.

"EDDIE!" she yelped, pounding on the door with her fists.

There was no answer. She stepped back, heart racing, and took a deep breath. Okay. So she was locked in a strange hallway in some guy's house. Okay. Okay. She rubbed her hands together, searching the hallway for signs of trouble. All that she could see were paintings - tasteful, professionally-spaced paintings hanging on well-lit patches of wall. Okay. Paintings. Right. She backed toward a chair, intending to rest for a moment, and arched upward as something bitterly cold bit into her backside.

The gun! She wrestled the case open and snatched the gun up. Was it loaded? Was the safety on? What did a safety look like, anyway? Did it matter? If anyone tried to hurt her, she'd just pull the trigger and see what happened. If it didn't go off...well, the thing was heavy enough. She'd probably be able to smack someone with it and at least give them a nasty bruise.

She crept down the hallway. As she passed the first painting, a piece of the floorboard beneath her foot suddenly dropped away, jamming to a halt two inches below the rest of the floor. She stumbled and caught herself just in time to see a grid of bars snap out from the walls behind her, sealing off the chairs and the door. Another set snapped out as she stood there, disbelieving.

They were getting closer! She bolted for the end of the hall, bars clacking into place behind her, and skidded around a corner just as the final set slammed into place. She leaned against a wall, panting, and looked around, gun at the ready.

This room was emphatically not as well-loved as the hallway. Cinder-block walls marked off a six-by-eight passageway leading forward only for a few feet before it turned sharply to the left. A draft blew icily above her head, coming from a broken window set high up in the warehouse wall. Using the badly-set bricks as a ladder, Jackie hauled herself up, peering over the cold gray wall like an urban prairie dog.

The passageway wound around the vast warehouse floor, opening onto occasional wide spaces and detouring around abandoned machinery before ending...she squinted, tracing the path with her eyes...over there, near the bottom of that old iron staircase. At the top of the staircase, in a glass-walled enclosure, Carlos and Eddie looked down on her. Covertly, Eddie gave her a thumbs-up.

She bit back an urge to stick her tongue out at him and dropped back to the floor. Suddenly all those little remarks about 'a new one' and 'was he sure' popped back up in her mind. Maybe this was standard procedure for all new henchgirls. Well, if this was her entrance exam, she'd better get it over with.

Gun in hand, eyeing the walls for more little surprises, Jackie clicked into the labryinth on her shiny black heels, wishing beyond wishes for her comfortable, ratty old tennis shoes.

* * *

Unbeknownst to Jackie, but knownst to nearly everyone else involved with the rogues' gallery, Carlos was the man to go to when you needed to acquire some skills. His warehouse-sized obstacle course came in very handy for training underlings, of course, but he also had a university-caliber library stored on a wall full of compact discs, as well as technical manuals for most of the world's weapons of mass and minor destruction. Not only did he possess all of this knowledge, but he'd read it and absorbed it until he'd become a quiet expert in nearly everything a master criminal would need to know. Carlos knew lots of things, some of which were extremely useful in keeping the police department off his back.

He stood thoughtfully next to Eddie as they watched Jackie maneuvering through the labyrinth of traps and tests. A six-by-six pool of deep, stagnant water blocked her path. She backed up, took a deep breath, and sprinted forward, leaping at the very last second and managing to land on her feet on the other side.

"So where'd you get this one?" Carlos said idly, taking another bite of his rapidly diminishing turkey leg.

"Don't tell me you don't know," Eddie said lightly, aware that very little happened in the rogues' world that didn't get back to Carlos sooner or later.

Carlos chuckled. "Yeah, I heard. She really took out Robin?"

"One shove," Eddie said proudly. "_And_ she got me away from Batman before I even hired her."

"Nice." Carlos tossed the bare turkey bone in a nearby garbage can and wiped his hands clean on his makeshift apron. "She's coming up on the hard stuff now." They leaned a little closer to the window, watching her in silence.

She battled through, doing about as well as the average person might, but certainly not displaying any of the superhuman agility, speed, or strength that some of his past henchgirls had possessed. He had imagined their first heist to be spectacular, news-making, Bat-breaking kind of stuff - but if it was going to end up with one or both of them back in Arkham before the fun even began, then maybe it would be necessary to downgrade his plans a bit.

A grate with a widely-splayed laptop attached to its very center blocked her passage. She examined the screen, tapped out a sequence of seemingly random letters on the keyboard, and grinned as the grate slid harmlessly into the floor. Eddie beamed proudly.

His smile faded as she continued along. The hand-to-hand combat simulator was too much for her, though she did give it a valiant try. When the fake Batman and Robin popped out at her from the walls, she threw herself backward, not forward - though she did bop them playfully on the heads on her way past them. And when it came to target practice with the gun...well, novices did often underestimate the kick a gun like that had when the trigger was pulled, but they didn't usually fall flat on their backsides like an Olympic vaulter having a really bad day.

"What'd she do before you hired her?" Carlos asked, as Jackie managed to get her next shot vaguely near the target without falling over.

"Computers."

"Oh." They watched her shoot again. She shot a few more times, getting closer to the human silhouette on the target each time. On the sixth shot, she managed to wing the paper target on the left shoulder. She moved onward and began hauling herself up the cargo net stretched across the passageway. She crawled upward at a snail's pace, the soles of her high heels slipping on the nylon rope, shifting the gun from one hand to the other as she pulled herself along.

"Look, I don't want to offend you," Carlos said carefully, "but this one's gonna need a lot of practice before she's up to your usual stuff."

Eddie sighed. "You're right," he agreed, drumming his fingers on the windowsill.

Supervillains had standards. It was sort of an odd phenomenon, given that supervillains as a whole were inclined to do, wear, and blow up whatever they liked. But once you crossed the line from villainy into _super_villainy, it was important to only do those things that would continue cementing you firmly into your new status. Lex Luthor would never be caught stealing cakes when he could be luring Superman into yet another intricate Kryptonite-laced trap. Catwoman would never be caught stuffing steaks down her pants in the local grocery store. And while the Joker had been known to use counterfeit money to steal five bucks worth of donuts, he'd also taken the time to carefully poison the helpless clerk with the distinctively toxic cash.

Consider Gotham, a city where a small army of villains, super and otherwise, are constantly bumping elbows with the various gangs, mobs, and other criminal enterprises that try to take over every city worth running. Every bank, every jeweler, every museum and scientific laboratory, therefore, has sunk quite a large part of their operating budget into the maintenance of a well-trained security detail, complete with cameras, guns, and anything else the average joe might need to take out any unwanted after-hours visitors.

And so the Riddler found himself in an uncomfortable position. If he maintained his standards and robbed, say, a bank, his inexperienced henchgirl might find herself captured rather quickly. While this might not have been a big deal if it was any number of his previous girls, it mattered quite a bit to him that Jackie returned to their hideout in one un-Batted piece.

On the other hand, if he stuck to places where Jackie was unlikely to be captured, his supervillain ego would take a serious beating. The Riddler did not rob pawn shops - well, not anymore, anyway - and being seen stealing from a penny-ante place like that would make what little respect he had in the criminal community completely vanish.

All of his previous grand plans had to be tabled for another day. There had to be somewhere that they could rob. Somewhere where the people weren't going to be inclined to hurt them, or even to chase after them. Somewhere where there was lots of money and just the right amount of security (enough to salvage his ego, but not quite enough to pose a threat). Somewhere where they could stay hidden in plain sight until they struck...

An idea blazed across Eddie's brain, lighting up his face with the joy of an answer found. That was it! The perfect place! He'd never robbed it before - in fact, no one had - and okay, so it was hardly Gotham National Bank, but it would still give them enough cash to put together something amazing for next time.

He ripped the notebook from his pocket and scribbled something furiously. Carlos, used to his customers' little idiosyncracies, politely ignored him and watched the girl in the green dress trying to pick a padlock with exactly the wrong kind of lockpick.

* * *

Commissioner Gordon stamped his feet, clearing a small space to stand in by the snowdrift engulfing the base of the Batsignal. Falling snowflakes hissed and died as they landed on the hot metal of the enormous searchlight.

Batman stepped out of the shadows. Gordon cut right to the chase, eager to get back inside where a warm pot of coffee awaited him. "I got an email today written in binary. One of the boys downstairs translated it for me." He passed the folded piece of paper to the Batman.

Batman unfolded it. As his eyes scanned the text, his mouth began to take on that sullen, stern, tight-lipped look that meant someone was going to be very unhappy very shortly.

It read:

_The Lion is king but for a day.  
I'll win the crown, he'll hie away.  
A ruby gnu, and draco too,  
You'll find me when you look at you. _

"Any idea what it means?" Gordon asked.

"Unicorns," Batman muttered darkly. A blast of cold wind threw icy snowflakes into Gordon's face. When he blinked them away, Batman was gone.

(_to be continued_)

_Author's Note: The Joker's donut adventure happened in "Laughter After Midnight" from The Batman Adventures Annual #1. The song that Eddie idly hums during the drive is 'Gonna Fly Now' from the Rocky soundtrack. Oh, and Lex Luthor did steal forty cakes, which is as many as four tens, and that's terrible. _


	2. Fetch

Since the dawn of time, mankind has loved costumes. From prehistoric times, when men dressed as wolves to aid the hunt, to the modern tradition of dropping twenty bucks on some crudely sewn nylon and velcro every Halloween, costumes have been a part of nearly every culture and lifestyle across the planet. There was something universally intoxicating about the power to wear clothes that represented something you weren't - powerful, beautiful, mythical or even impossible.

Of course, some cultures were more costume-friendly than others, a fact which had become quite useful to the Riddler as he'd planned their next heist.

"This is really hot," Jackie complained, tugging at the black vinyl bodice of her short black dress.

Eddie, fumbling to pull his own costume on over his question-marked suit, spared a moment to grin cheekily at her. "Isn't that my line?"

"You can't honestly think that this thing is _attractive_," she said, sliding on her black spiky gauntlets.

"Well, I have to say the color scheme is a little off-putting," he agreed, fastening the velcro at the tops of his shoulders.

"A little off-putting?" Jackie repeated, disbelieving. "A _little off-putting_?"

"It's not the costume that matters, it's who's inside it," he reminded her, tweaking her nose. He yanked his mask down over his head. Begrudgingly, she pulled her own on as well, scowling as the smell of rubber invaded her nostrils. "Come on. Let's get this thing started!"

Jackie took a deep breath, trying to banish the nervous quivers trembling in every joint of her body. Four days of training in Carlos' warehouse of tricks wasn't nearly long enough. Oh, sure, now she was able to hit a target nine out of ten times with her gun, but hitting a paper target pinned to a wall was an entirely different prospect from shooting at a living, breathing, bullet-dodging Batman.

If he even showed up, that is. After all, it was lunchtime! Batman never showed up until after the streetlights came on unless something serious was happening. And what could be too serious about this? They weren't going to blow up the building or anything. They were just going to go in, get some money, and get back out. And okay, so the riddle would lead Batman right to them, and yes, he was probably still incredibly angry about Eddie letting everyone out of Arkham, and sure, four measly days of training was pretty much useless, but...

Maybe she could just stay in the car.

No! No, she had to do this. What other choice did she have? Any chance she would have had to stay safely law-abiding and anonymous had disappeared that day that she'd shoved Robin into the deathtrap at the opera. This was her life now. It was time to start living it. And as soon as she convinced her kneecaps to stop their Jello imitation, she could get started.

She sighed a long, calming sigh and nervously yanked at her gauntlets again. As Eddie opened the door, she grabbed his arm. "You really think I can do this?"

He patted her slightly sweaty hand. "Relax, pumpkin. Would I get you caught on your first time out? Trust me!"

Eddie hopped out of their car, adjusting the sit of his costume as he waited for Jackie to join him. Then, walking together hand-in-hand, the world's most unlikely Batman and Batgirl strolled toward their destination.

* * *

The lobby of the Gotham Towers Hotel was plush and extravagant. Intricately laid marble tiles stretched in a gently curved mosaic across the wide floors. Velvet curtains, richly colored, draped gently alongside the highly polished windows. A collection of armchairs and sofas clustered in small groups on a wine-red carpet, accompanied by polished wood tables and leaded-glass lamps.

Of course, it was hard to see all of this opulence through the crowd of humanity swirling by. Girls with neon dreadfalls and fishnet tights lounged on the sofas, chatting with boys wearing fox tails and older men with matching large eyeglasses and standard-issue beards. Women in corsets and top hats posed for pictures in the entryway, cocking their legs to display the carefully repainted Nerf guns strapped to their thighs.

Most of the attendees were in some form of costume or another. Pirates debated with ponies, robots squinted at wall posters through their detailed masks, and seven different men dressed in the same dark blue pinstripe suit and red tennis shoes nattered enthusiastically about their favorite episode of their favorite show. Everyone from the mothers tending toddlers in Starfleet uniforms to the renaissance-garbed guy playing two flutes with his nose seemed to have a laptop at their side.

The amount of people in otherworldly or ancient costumes was completely dwarfed, however, by the number of people wearing black Bat-cowls on their heads. It didn't matter what was on their bodies - t-shirts, dresses, nearly authentic-looking armor or little squares of duct tape preserving the decencies - it seemed like the hottest fashion accessory was a cheap rubber mask with a Bat-logo stamped in bright yellow on it.

A maze of tables sprawled in the space near the hotel's main desk. Above them, strapped to a pair of pristine white pillars, a banner read "WELCOME TO UNICON!" A set of paper signs had been taped to it, instructing the preregistered to go here, the unregistered to go there, and the complainers to go over _there _away from the rest of them.

Eddie, safely concealed beneath the bat-mask, led Jackie to the back of the line. As they stood there, waiting patiently, he did a rough head-count of the attendees as they hurried by. From what he could tell, the hotel was easily hosting a few thousand people - and a few thousand people paying fifty bucks each meant that it would be a very good night indeed for the Riddler.

At long last, they were at the front of the line. "Cash or card?" asked the young lady behind the table, yanking on her too-tight unicorn-embossed UNICON t-shirt to get it to cover her waist.

Eddie blinked. "Card?"

"We can take cards this year," she informed him, holding up an iPhone with a little slider attached to it. "Awesome, huh? So cash or card?"

"Cash," he said firmly. The woman turned around to grab a pair of registration forms. While her back was turned, Eddie slipped a small device from one of the many pockets of the Bat-belt, flicked it on, and kicked it deftly under the white tablecloth.

"Here you are!" she said cheerfully, handing them the forms. Eddie scrawled his chosen fake name - Red Rild - across the correct blank. Beside him, he could see Jackie printing Beckie Jarak on her own sheet.

"Smeg! Julie, lemme see your phone," a registration worker said, dropping his own phone to the table in disgust. "It's not connecting to the credit servers."

"Here," she said, passing it over.

The luckless man swiped the card again. "Yours is out too," he said, passing it back to her.

She yanked her shirt down again. "Great. Today's gonna be _fabulous_. Here are your badges," she said as Eddie and Jackie handed over their forms. "Programs are down there, lanyards are next to them. Have a great weekend!"

They obediently followed the table to the heaping box of paper programs. "So what now?" Jackie whispered, threading a lanyard through the little hole in her plastic badge. "I've never been to one of these things before."

"Neither have I," Eddie shrugged, fussing with the strap on his lanyard as it tangled briefly on his Bat-ears.

"How did you know it was happening, then?"

"Oh, I keep track of a lot of events," he said absently, settling his nametag on his chest. "There's a toy convention in a few weeks that looked promising, too, but the logistics on this one were much better."

"And do you think...he...got your email?" Jackie asked tentatively.

"Oh, I'm sure of it," Eddie said. "Of course, reading it and figuring it out are two entirely different things. I doubt he'll even show up. The registration desk closes at seven," he continued, not noticing Jackie's immediately doubtful and extremely nervous glance at the front door. "That gives us...let's see...four hours to kill. Shall we wander?" He offered his arm. Jackie threaded her own through his and put a smile on her face.

"Lead the way."

* * *

There are many types of conventions in the world run by and for geeks and nerds. There are conventions that focus on computers, and those that focus on fantasy, and those that devote an entire weekend to celebrating a single television show or movie. UNICON took all of these ideas and more and threw them into the blender.

There was something for everyone at UNICON. The program book, which was large enough to contain a small town's telephone directory, listed at least twenty different ways to spend any given hour.

Jackie and Eddie had chosen to spend their four hours walking about, people-watching and getting the lay of the land. They had strolled into the atrium, where a demonstration of war tactics was being conducted by a large group of men and women armed with only the finest imaginary weapons. Across the enormous room, beyond the fenced-off swimming pool set into the center of the floor, a fifteen-foot-high troll swatted amiably at a small boy with an enormous foam battleaxe. The troll, nimble on the stilts tucked inside his enormous pants, danced out of the range of a particularly wild blow from the axe as passersby applauded. From the hotel-room balconies lining the walls, groups of people decorating their rooms for the night's parties waved at people far below them and tried to shout instructions over the thundering buzz of people having a good time.

A horde of screaming men dressed as wizards ran at the swimming pool with chunks of dry ice clutched in their heavily gloved hands. They heaved the dry ice over the fence and the empty pool disappeared under an instant, billowing cloud of fog. The wizards cheered, celebrating their fun with an impromptu mug of homemade soda dispensed by a huge man with a large metal canister strapped to his back.

On and on they wandered, browsing through rooms filled with film props and tv memorabilia, pointing out especially interesting-looking costumed passersby to one another and basking in the anonymity of being just another person under a Bat-cowl.

Jackie clutched Eddie's arm tighter as they walked into the next room. This vast, echoing ballroom was crammed with tables, each filled to bursting with anything a congoer would ever want. Jewelry! Custom art! Comic books! Computer parts! Board games! And over there -

"Look at all the _unicorns_!" Jackie squealed, all but dragging Eddie down the crowded passageway. The table, over which a life-size winged unicorn dangled gently from almost-invisible strings, was covered end-to-end with unicorns of every sort. Ceramic unicorns were lined neatly next to a shining array of unicorn jewelry. Plush unicorns were stuffed into cubbies on the shelves, books about unicorns were splayed open on yet more shelves, and a selection of unicorn t-shirts hung from the front of the table like a very white and extremely sparkly tablecloth.

"You like unicorns?" the vendor smiled, tucking a strand of her long black hair behind her ear.

"Oh, _yes_," Jackie breathed, eyes darting from one unicorn to the next.

Eddie glanced up at the clock on the wall and stiffened slightly. "It's six-thirty," he said, nudging Jackie in the ribs.

"Okay," Jackie said, holding a delicate shell-pink unicorn up to the light and watching it sparkle.

"Six-thirty," he repeated. Jackie seemed not to hear him. "We have to _go_," he insisted.

"That one's twenty-five percent off," the vendor said, pointing at an iridescent glass unicorn perched on a bed of candy-colored grass.

"Oh!" Jackie swooped down on the jewelry, sifting a necklace from the tangle of chain with eager fingers. "Oh, look at this one!"

Eddie peered at it. She obligingly held it up for him to see. The small silver unicorn, rearing up on its hind legs, glared at the world through a tiny emerald eye. Eddie, about to dismiss it, found his eyes drawn back to it as he realized that the unicorn's tail formed an almost perfect question mark.

"How much?" he asked.

"Thirty-five," the vendor said cheerfully.

Eddie pulled a wad of cash from a pocket in his utility belt and paid her in exact change. Jackie immediately slipped it onto her throat, adjusting it so that it hung proudly over the bat-symbol on her chest. "Oh, thank you so much!" she chirped, catching Eddie in an enormous bear hug.

He extricated himself and straightened his cowl. "You're welcome. Can we go now?"

* * *

By seven o'clock, the registration tables had been completely destroyed. The carefully stacked boxes of programs, now empty, were piled in careless heaps on the floor. The pristine white tablecloths were dotted with ink of every color and pencil lead. The badge-printing machine, which had broken twice, lay in pieces on the table while a pair of women probed at its insides with an array of tiny tools. The rest of the volunteer crew were gathered in the corner, where six hot, fresh pizzas steamed invitingly in their cardboard boxes.

One of them stuffed the last bit of his crust in his mouth and snagged another slice, using his other hand to scoop up a backpack full of money and sling it over his shoulder. "I'm gonna make a run to the bank." He edged out from behind the cluster of tables and strolled away, concentrating more on the pizza than the partygoers surrounding him.

Eddie stepped in his path, grinning as the man did his best to juggle the pizza and the money while trying not to ram into him. "I'll take that," he offered, reaching for the hefty sack of cash.

"Funny," the man said, twitching the bag away from the Riddler's reaching hand. He tossed the rest of the pizza in a handy garbage can and wiped his hand on his pants. "Need some gas money for the Batmobile?"

"Not exactly," Eddie smiled. He popped the Bat-armor open just enough for the man to see his question-marked coat beneath it. Beside him, Jackie eased a gun out of the holster strapped to her leg. "Riddle me this...Steve," he said, glancing at the man's nametag. "When is a-"

He never quite got to finish his sentence, because Steve ripped his rubber armor open until the chestpiece dangled limply from one barely-attached piece of shoulder velcro. "What is _that_?" he scowled, glaring at the question marks. "Riddle me this, loser, why would you dress up like that asshole?"

"What did you say?" Eddie growled softly.

"I said the Riddler's an _asshole_," Steve enunciated, distinctly and scornfully. "He killed my uncle with an exploding watermelon!"

Old, sullen anger reared up in the back of Eddie's mind. That watermelon was supposed to have been a clue for a major heist - a major heist that he'd had to substitute a sub-par last-minute riddle for, which was exceedingly irritating - and he'd never quite managed to let go of his frustration about it. "Yeah? Well, maybe your idiot uncle should have been smart enough not to pick up a watermelon with question marks painted all over it!"

"You watch your mouth," Steve growled, shoving Eddie on the shoulder.

"Make me," Eddie snapped.

The man cocked a fist, fully prepared to sock Eddie in the face, and paused when he noticed that he was looking down the barrels of two bottle-green guns. "I wouldn't, if I were you," Eddie said quietly. "The money. Now."

"You're really him?" Steve asked.

Eddie's eyes glinted mischievously. "You bet I am...asshole."

Steve narrowed his eyes. Ignoring the guns, ignoring the bag of money, and ignoring the fact that tackling supervillains never turned out well, he flung himself at the Riddler, intending to do as much damage as he could with his balled-up fists.

Unfortunately for him, the first thing that he collided with was Jackie's outthrust knee. It was, perhaps, doubly unfortunate for him that Jackie had such sharp reflexes, particularly when it came to people threatening Eddie. He crumpled into a wheezing, knock-kneed hunch of pain.

The bag of money slid off of his shoulder and dropped with a thud at Eddie's feet. He scooped it up and slung it onto his shoulder. Without a further word, they bolted for the front doors.

"_Security_!" Steve yelped, clutching himself with one hand and using the other to point at Eddie. "_He's stealing our money_!"

A pair of burly men in black suits appeared from behind clusters of fanboys and blocked the doors, waiting with arms spread as the Riddler and Jackie thundered closer.

"Out the back," he hissed. They kicked into reverse and sprinted through the lobby, skidding into one of the many hallways leading to ballrooms and meeting rooms. They ducked and dodged around the slow-moving conventiongoers, hopping over trailing dresses and shoving through groups of talkers that blocked the halls.

Their hallway let out into the hotel's atrium. The tactics crew and the larpers had disappeared, leaving the space around the pool open for general gathering and chatting as people waited for the room parties to open up.

Eddie and Jackie raced up the little stairs leading to the open area, glancing behind them to check for pursuers, and slowed down as they came to the high fence that separated the pool area from the rest of the floor. Another Batman leaned idly up against the lone door in the fence.

"'Scuse us," Jackie panted as they approached. "Let us through!"

The Batman slowly and gracefully pulled himself off of the fence and cracked his knuckles. He stood there, silent and immovable, glaring down at them.

Eddie brandished his gun. "Move," he commanded.

A Batarang from nowhere zipped through the air and cracked into his fingers, sending the gun twirling uselessly across the floor. "Nice outfit," Robin - the _real_ Robin - said, leaping athletically down from one of the balconies.

Eddie, wide-eyed, turned his gaze back to Batman, who favored him with a slow, shark-like grin of pure malice. He took a step backward as Batman, the _real_ Batman, who was curling his gloved hands into extremely real fists that were going to leave some extraordinarily real bruises on him in a few seconds, eased himself into a fighter's crouch.

"What now?" Jackie hissed, keeping a white-knuckled grip on her gun.

Eddie frantically looked for options. A crowd of convention-goers had gathered around them,snapping pictures as if they were some kind of impromptu street performance and commenting on the authenticity of their costumes. (Or the lack thereof, in Jackie's case - any Batgirl that showed up to work in a knee-length skirt was a Batgirl who would be in serious trouble when she found that she couldn't kick anyone in the throat.)

They thought this was an act. Could he work with that? Not if it meant that today's production would become an encore performance of The Brutal Beating of the Riddler (in glorious 4-D)!

Well, that only left one option, didn't it? He hitched the strap of the bag up on his shoulder with his aching fingers and whispered his answer out of the side of his mouth.

"**Pulpits**!"

(_to be continued_)

_Author's Note: Thanks to ConFusion, Marscon, Penguicon and Convergence for providing me with the setting for this story as well as overwhelming amounts of fun and costumed frolics. _


	3. Bad Dog

No one goes through life without a plan. Even lank-haired greasy lunatics prancing through burn wards in drag have plans, even if that plan is in its entirety 'Make mayhem however possible'.

The Riddler, in planning for this heist, had come up with half a dozen plans to get out of the building. The front door was, of course, the best choice, with several other escape routes immediately following them on the list. If all of those failed, it was time to split up and find their own ways out. After all, Eddie had promised Jackie that he wouldn't get her caught on her first time out, and if he stayed a few steps ahead of the Bat he could safely lose him in the crowd while Jackie got away.

Of course, the Bat had ruined that perfectly serviceable plan by bringing his sidekick to the party. Still, Eddie reasoned, Jackie had managed to take Robin out once - surely she could do so again, given the right motivation, and being threatened by Batman in Apprehension Mode was enough motivation to make the average man move mountains.

Jackie, following instructions, sprinted away along the fence. With a handspring off of a nearby table, Robin leapt atop the narrow metal fence and trotted along after her, keeping his balance on the thin metal strip as easily as if he was walking down a sidewalk.

The Riddler and the Batman faced each other down, as they often had. Unlike all those other times, however, now they were surrounded by a crowd of costumed congoers armed with cameras.

It was clearly in Batman's interest to end the fight as quickly as possible, which meant that it was up to Eddie to drag it out as long as he could. Batman darted forward and thrust a hand at Eddie's shoulder to grab him, and Eddie just as quickly threw himself to the side to avoid him.

"Hey! Batman versus Batman!"

"Betcha five bucks the little one takes the big one!"

"You're on!"

Eddie scuttled to the side, avoiding a leaping kick aimed at his face. "Can I place a bet?" he called, keeping his eyes firmly locked on Batman.

"Sure thing!" a guy in the crowd called. "How much?"

"This much. You count it." The Riddler grinned cheekily at Batman, unzipped the bag, and swung it madly over his head. Money flew in a snowstorm of green as the Riddler tossed the empty bag into the pool. It was a shame to lose all of that money, but any amount of money was worth it to stay out of Arkham.

"Hey - it's _real_!" The crowd immediately dove for the cash, wrestling and climbing over one another to scoop up the twenties and fifties that spiraled down around them. Security guards, accompanied by a few policemen, did their best to keep the mob from growing as the money disappeared into pockets and down the front of well-filled corsets. Flailing, questing arms smacked into both the Batman and the Riddler, catching in their capes and scratching their unguarded chins.

Eddie forced his way out of a huddle of treasure-seekers, fake Bat-armor dangling at his waist like the skin of a half-peeled banana, and pried a new gun out of the side of his plastic utility belt. Before he could even attempt to aim it, a batarang _zzzzip_ped through the air and knocked it away, rebounding off of his hand and slamming directly into his forehead. A flap of rubber drooped over his right eye.

"How do you _see_ in this thing?" he snapped. He ripped the flap of rubber off, threw it at the Bat as if it might do any sort of good, and dove back into the crowd.

That is, he _tried_ to dive back into the crowd. Between the backpack full of money and the question-marked suit on display under the rapidly disintegrating rubber Batsuit, the Riddler's identity had been confirmed for even the most inattentive congoers. Like Steve and his unfortunate uncle, nearly every one of them knew someone who had been victimized by a rogue, and none of them were willing to let one escape. And, unfortunately for the Riddler, physical activity had become a major part of the geekdom lifestyle, and bodies kept fit by hours of DDR and SCA duels formed a living barricade between him and the exit.

He caromed off of the bystanders and staggered backward, falling to the ground just in time to miss a roundhouse kick that would have caught him in the shoulder. He rolled to his feet and dodged around the vigilante, trying to break through another part of the circle. A six-foot-six burly guy with a stench like an unwashed yak shoved him back toward the Batman. He flailed, trying to stay upright, and felt his ankle roll unpleasantly in the wrong direction.

And it was at this immensely inopportune moment that the remains of the cowl, slippery with his sweat, dropped completely over his eyes. He wrenched the cowl off, freeing his head just in time to have it rammed heavily into the fence. A black forearm tipped with sharp batwinged spikes leaned against his trachea.

"I've been waiting for this a long time, Nygma," Batman growled, pressing his arm a little harder into Eddie's throat.

"Would you mind waiting a little bit longer?" he wheezed, as the corners of the iron bars incised themselves into his back. At least maybe he'd be spared his usual beating with so many witnesses around.

He smiled weakly at Batman, who glared back at him with a level-ten If I Killed People I Would Kill You With My Mind look on his face.

Then again, maybe not.

* * *

Running from the forces of justice is an acquired skill. Merely being a good sprinter is not nearly enough when the person behind you is well-versed in a variety of gymnastic skills and armed with a selection of miniaturized gadgetry that would put the inventory of the Sharper Image to shame.

Jackie raced across the carpeted floor, slipping a bit as her bright yellow elasticated boot covers slid under the soles of her sneakers. Something hard and heavy thudded into the small of her back. She shrieked and stumbled, dropping her gun but managing to stay on her feet.

The pool fence extended across the width of the raised center of the atrium. At the far side of the fence, a small three-stepped stairway led to a lowered hallway, which in turn led to a bank of hotel rooms with waist-high walls blocking off their small patios. Each patio was full of people busily moving furniture, taping decorations to the walls, hanging banners and doing any one of a thousand things necessary to transform the room into a highly themed party.

Jackie flung herself down the tiny steps and straight into a room where red rope lights shone blindingly off of the silver foil coating the walls. She dodged through it, bouncing off of congoers waiting in a line and nearly colliding with an enormous white menu that listed toast with a bewildering variety of toppings. She hit the far wall, clawed at the foil until a door handle appeared, and shoved her way into the hallway.

The costumes that she'd seen that day were no match for the costumes displayed at night. Body paint, duct tape, corsets, leather, fake fur and shining metal filled the halls from wall to wall. Jackie shouldered her way through, wincing at the occasional spill of ice-cold alcohol down her arms.

She risked a glance behind her. Robin was still behind her, manuevering through the crowd with practiced ease. She squeezed between two burly Klingons and popped free into a fairly empty space of hall.

Ahead of her was the lobby - the lobby, the front doors, and sweet, sweet freedom. She dashed for the door, skidding to a wild halt as the hall before her filled with a cluster of policemen and paramedics.

She swung to the right. A rowboat-sized pirate ship on wheels was parked in front of a set of narrow carpeted stairs. A crew of pirates, riotously drunk, dared passersby to complete a set of pirate trials to earn a coveted ribbon.

Jackie sped up and vaulted the ship, knocking a bowl of carefully halved limes onto the ground with the heel of her shoe as she hurdled onward. She landed on her hands and knees halfway up the stairs and scrambled upward, swearing as her cape wrapped briefly around the ankle of a passerby and slowed her down.

Was going up a mistake? Of course it was. There were no doors up here - at least, no doors going outside. _Stupid_, Jackie screamed at herself from inside her head. But where else could she have gone? Should she have tried running football-style at the cops and broken their line? It never would have worked. She could have stayed on the ground and ducked back around to the front of the parties. Maybe she could have slipped inside one and ditched her Batgirl costume, so she'd look more...oh, right. She had a green question-marked minidress on under the black dress. So much for being inconspicuous. Anyway, going back into the atrium would have meant running right back to Batman. No _thank_ you.

She wheeled around a corner and thudded down the hallway. Parties flashed by on the edge of her vision. A group of zombies in leis and coconut bras were dancing a solemn, lurching hula. A room filled with darkness flashed ominously with bright light.

A TARDIS jutted out from the doorframe of another door. Jackie tucked herself behind it, gasping for breath, and glanced down the hall. Robin wasn't there.

Salvation! She threw herself across the hallway into the first open door she saw and pushed inside, intending on hiding behind the bed.

There was no bed. There was no desk. In fact, all of the usual furniture had been moved out, leaving nothing but a narrow dresser, flimsy folding chairs and a card table full of sock puppet parts. An enormous television atop the dresser blared a cheerful cover of a rock song as sung by a green sock puppet and a white sock puppet in a skull t-shirt.

"Welcome to the party! Want some cereal?" a pink-haired girl asked, gesturing at a dresser top filled with boxes of cereal and jugs of milk in bowls of ice.

"Uh. No thanks," Jackie said, darting a quick glance behind her. Inspiration struck her like a fist to the head. "Can I use your bathroom?"

The pink-haired girl exchanged uneasy glances with a nearby redhead fussing with a DVD player. "No. Sorry," she said. "That's where all our stuff is."

"Please?" The pink-haired girl looked more uncertain. "_Please_?"

"Wellll..." she drawled. "Is it urgent?"

"You have no idea how urgent this is," Jackie said.

"Okay," the girl said. "Go ahead."

Jackie pelted into the bathroom and slammed the door shut tight behind her, clacking the lock into place with shaking fingers. Only then did she stagger across the small room, collapsing on the rim of the sparkly-clean bathtub. She pried the rubber cowl off and blotted the sweat from her forehead with a convenient hand towel. Then, still holding the towel, she buried her face in her hands.

This was a disaster. How did Eddie ever manage to escape from his heists if he all but sent Batman an engraved invitation? Oh, right. Deathtraps. Well, there hadn't been time to set one of _those_ up, not to mention that they'd need about fifty of them to make sure that there was one handy at all times.

Jackie stiffened as she heard a polite male voice just outside her door. "Has anyone seen someone dressed like Batgirl?"

"She's in the bathroom," the pink-haired girl said helpfully.

The doorknob rattled.

Jackie hastily got to her feet, yanking the rubber cowl back on in the hopes that it might provide some kind of protection from the pummeling that was waiting for her on the other side of the door. "Occupied!" she yelled, frantically searching for a weapon.

"Open the door," Robin ordered.

"Just a minute!"

There! An enormous old hair straightener was perched haphazardly on the mountain of beauty aids that filled the tiny countertop. Jackie snatched it up, gathering the cord so that she didn't trip on it. A hair straightener might not seem threatening, but when you really looked at it, it was a five-pound chunk of metal with a convenient molded handgrip, which was about as weapony as you could get when you were improvising in someone else's bathroom.

She didn't let herself stop to think. If she stopped to think, she'd get nervous, and then she'd do something stupid like drop the thing as she was trying to open the door. Instead, she ripped the door open and flung herself forward, brandishing the straightener high over her head. There he was! She swung the straightener, intent on cracking the vigilante right on his uncowled head.

Robin grabbed her by the arm and twisted her around, tossing her high in the air. She screeched with dismay as she landed heavily on the card table. Feathers, fake fur, and googly eyes exploded in a cloud around her as the cheap table bent and collapsed under her weight with a loud set of snapping noises.

Through the blur of her adrenaline-clouded senses, Jackie heard the crowd of people in the room gasp with shock. "What the hell's going on?"

"The Riddler's downstairs. She's his partner." Jackie cracked an eye open to see a well-used boot resting a few inches from her nose. "Had enough fun for one day?" Robin asked her lightly.

Jackie groaned and tried to push herself to her feet. Her left arm collapsed under her. She sprawled on her side, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Her left arm lay in front of her, draped unnaturally over a glass jar of pipe cleaners. Sick, cold nausea boiled in her stomach at the sight of it. Her arm was broken. Her arm was broken and there was Robin, standing over her, and maybe things would have been better if she'd just apologized to him all those months ago. Maybe if she'd sent him a fruit basket or something he'd have been okay with her accidentally shoving him into that deathtrap. Maybe then he wouldn't be hauling her to her feet - by her good arm, thankfully - and pushing her out of the party and back down the stairs.

"Welcome back to Gotham," Robin said.

"I didn't mean it," she mumbled dully. "The opera."

"Well, I didn't mean to break your arm. Guess we're even," he said cheerfully, guiding her back into the atrium as hot red pain began to pulse up her arm.

* * *

Eddie sat on the ground, hands cuffed tightly behind his back, doing his best to ignore everyone and everything around him. His throat ached, his hand throbbed, and countless bruises and scratches over his body tingled with their promise to make the next few weeks one stinging, wincing torture session. His left foot, now shoeless, was beginning to swell up as his sprained ankle made itself at home.

A paramedic shone a light into his eyes. Eddie winced away from it. "Pupil response is good," the woman said, taking the opportunity to examine his skull while his head was turned. "Quite a bump here, but he'll be fine."

Eddie glared at the floor, trying to gauge just how badly his lip had swollen with the tip of his tongue. Yes, the presence of the crowd had prevented the beating that matched the promise in Batman's smile - or maybe just delayed it - but any relief he'd gotten from that was quickly dissipating as he was made the subject of countless cell phone pictures and videos. Next time, they wouldn't rob a place that had so many bystanders equipped with so many cameras.

"Got her!" Robin's cheery voice announced. Eddie looked up, startled, to see Jackie being propelled toward him with a distracted, sickly look accompanied by a rivulet of blood on her paper-pale face. One arm was locked firmly in Robin's green-gloved grip. The other arm dangled in an extremely familiar needing-immediate-medical-attention kind of way.

Eddie was not often given to fits of blind rage, nor was he the type to brawl his way out of custody. So when he jumped to his feet and raced toward Robin, intent on stomping him into little pieces despite his sprained ankle, everyone was surprised, including himself.

His brief attempt at vengeance was cut short when Batman grabbed him by the cape and yanked, knocking him flat on his handcuffed wrists and bouncing his head against the concrete floor again. The sharp points covering the bat-shaped cuffs stabbed into his back. Why did bats have to have so many pointy bits? Why couldn't the man have picked a softer animal to dress up like? Cuffs shaped like hamsters wouldn't be nearly so pointy...

"Eddie!"

Eddie marshaled his senses into some kind of order and looked around for Jackie. A pair of paramedics were strapping her down on a gurney while a set of policemen looked on. One of them ratcheted a pair of handcuffs around both her good arm and the steel siderails of the gurney. "Eddie!" Jackie wailed, kicking as the paramedics held her arm down and injected her with something. "_Eddie_!"

Eddie raced to her rescue - or at least, he would have if Batman hadn't chosen that moment to yank him off the ground by one arm and sling him over his shoulder like a side of beef, ignoring the second empty gurney that was obviously intended for him. A twisted little sense of pride rose up in the back of his mind as Batman hauled him off. It was nice to be recognized as one of the biggest threats in Gotham.

On the other hand, being hand-delivered back to Arkham meant a good thirty minutes of quality time alone with a man who could easily break both of his legs - and, since that incident at Christmas, he would probably do so at the slightest provocation.

And what were they doing to Jackie?

He wheezed as Batman's shoulder dug into his bruised abdomen. "It'll be okay!" he shouted to Jackie, ignoring Batman's hand as it tightened on his aching leg. "I'll see you soon! Promise! I - _erk_," he grunted as Batman jerked his shoulder, making Eddie bounce like a ragdoll.

(_to be continued_)


	4. The Pound

The GCPD Receiving Hospital was unusually large. It had to be. In a city where justice was often dispensed by highly trained vigilantes with a penchant for breaking faces, nearly every criminal not apprehended by the police themselves required some significant medical attention before they could be transferred to a proper jail.

Fortunately for Jackie, as they wheeled her down the ancient antiseptic-drenched floors, she was the first catch of the day. This meant that the doctors on-call, eager to escape their mindless tedium by patching up perpetrators, were ready and waiting when she was handed over to their care.

She was tempted to think that it was actually better than going to a hospital as a non-felon. Indeed, the last time she'd been in an emergency room, for a searing pain in her back that turned out to be a kidney stone, she'd waited for hours while the seriously bleeding and broken hordes had been triaged ahead of her. And when it was finally her turn, there was a stack of paperwork the size of a small novel to fill out before anyone would help her.

Here, there was no paperwork. There were no lines. And maybe the doctors onstaff weren't the nation's best and brightest, but they were certainly competent enough to set her broken arm and wrap a bundle of plaster strips around it. They even gave her some painkillers, which eased both the pain in her arm and the growing storm of anxiety building in her gut.

After her arm had been cared for, they parked her in the lobby of the hospital and left her under the watchful eye of a guard. She supposed they were waiting for someone to come and pick her up and take her...wherever she was going.

The painkillers let her think about her destination without the risk of breaking into tears or hysterical screaming. Eddie had said they wouldn't be caught. Eddie had _promised_ that they wouldn't be caught. But here she was, locked to a gurney in a prisoner's hospital, waiting to be taken...somewhere.

Where had they taken Eddie? He was certainly hurt enough to need a doctor's care. She sighed as she realized that they must have taken him directly to Arkham. Arkham had a medical wing, didn't it? She thought she remembered Crane and Dent talking about it at the Iceberg one night. So if Eddie was in Arkham's medical wing, but she was _here_, that meant...well, she wasn't going to Arkham, that was what it meant. No Arkham, which meant plain old normal terror-inducing jail for her.

It made sense. That was where they'd put all the rest of them. Claudia and Delilah and Tiffany, Liz and Paula, and all the rest of the Riddler's legion of ex-henchgirls had ended up in normal prison. And now Jackie was on her way there too, because she'd done a terrible job as a henchgirl and let Eddie get caught.

The painkillers wanted to take her away to a soft, fluffy, carefree land of daydreams. Jackie firmly closed her eyes and let them.

* * *

The Riddler shifted uncomfortably under his thin blanket, cursing the wrist restraints that kept him from easing a wadded-up wrinkle of his hospital gown out from under his back. Around him, the small population of Arkham's medical wing muttered dreamily in their drug-induced slumbers as drowsy nurses checked vitals and changed bandages.

The trip to Arkham, stuffed in the Batmobile's front seat, hadn't exactly been pleasant. Batman had refrained from any further vengeance once he'd been tucked (well, _shoved_) into the car, which was nice, but the man hadn't bothered to stop the car from bouncing over speed bumps and maintaining high speeds as they rounded corners, antics that Eddie and his array of new injuries were not pleased with. Fortunately, Batman had remained stoically silent along the way, only speaking when it was time to hand his battered, bleeding charge over to the orderlies at Arkham.

As they'd gone through the normal nonsense of intake - taking his clothes, tending his injuries, and making him answer those stupid 'what's your name/who's the President' questions - he'd kept an eye on the doors, waiting for Jackie to come through them.

She never arrived. Hours had passed - hours in which he'd been strapped to this infernal bed and forcibly medicated - and she still hadn't shown up. It was three AM - what was _taking_ them so long?

He flopped his head back on the pillow and let out a short, exasperated sigh that quickly turned into a pained grunt as his injured head reminded him that fresh contusions did not appreciate being banged around.

"Edward, it is three o'clock in the morning. Must you make so much noise?"

Eddie examined the man in the bed next to his. It was hard to make out much detail in the dim light. He was on top of the blankets, secured to his bed only by a set of leg restraints. His arms, upper torso, and head were almost completely covered by yards and yards of gauze bandages. The only clue to his identity was the shock of carrot-red hair sticking out of a gap between some of the bandages.

"Jonathan," Eddie greeted civilly. "What happened to you?"

"I was in the midst of an escape and found myself trapped in the janitor's closet. I had a rudimentary toxic formula half-concocted in a bucket when they kicked the door down and knocked a few open bottles into the mixture." The Scarecrow scowled at his padded arms. "Have you ever mixed ammonia and bleach?"

"One of the girls did once," Eddie said, lungs tingling at the memory.

"This was worse," Crane said flatly.

Eddie glanced at the clock again. When he looked back, he saw a pair of crystal-blue eyes watching him curiously through their mask of bandages. "Why do you keep looking at the clock?"

"They haven't brought Query in yet."

"You honestly think they'll send her here?" The Scarecrow coughed a short, humorless chuckle. "Edward, Edward, Edward. You know they don't send your girls to Arkham. Your girls tend to be stupid, not crazy."

"Jackie is not stupid," Eddie snapped, squirming irritably beneath his thin blanket.

"You actually care about this one?" Crane sighed. "You know what a liability that is. Look what happened to you. If you'd used her as protection like a proper henchgirl you'd be on the streets right now."

Eddie did his best to ignore him. Oh, Crane had a point - henches were, as a rule, hired to keep you safe from Batman. What good was a henchgirl who couldn't fight Batman?

On the other hand, what about the slew of ex-henchgirls that he'd hired and fired through the years? They had all been fighters, every last one of them, and every one of them had proven to be almost impossible to live with. They pestered him while he was writing riddles, refused to pick up after themselves, and committed a collection of other domestic felonies that made it a pleasure to leave them in Batman's hands while he got as far away from them as he could.

Jackie was different. She cared about him - not his money, not his reputation, but _him._ She'd saved him from Batman - okay, maybe not this time, but she'd certainly succeeded in the past. She had the potential to be a very useful part of his professional life (not to mention the fun she brought to his personal life).

And if they didn't bring her to Arkham soon, he was going to have to go looking for her.

"Awake already, boys?" A nurse stood at the foot of their beds, arms folded. "Let's just get you back to sleep."

Before he could protest - not that it would have stopped her, anyway - the nurse slid a syringe into a port in his IV. The world gracefully faded away.

* * *

In many ways, jail is more dangerous than prison. Prisons have the luxury of separating their inmates by the severity of their crimes, dividing up the petty thieves from the serial killers.

Jails, however, hold those that haven't been to trial yet - and that meant that everyone shared the same space, hired killers and DUIs alike. To prevent too many accidents (or "accidents") from happening, the Gotham wardens had implemented a color-based jumpsuit system to easily identify the notorious from the nobodys.

Jackie had been transferred from the hospital to a jail after a surprisingly brief wait in the hospital's lobby. When she'd arrived, bleary-eyed and nauseous with pain, they'd walked her through the endless minutiae of the booking procedure. They'd taken fingerprints, both from her good hand and a set of substandard blotchy ones taken from her immobile broken arm. They had taken everything of hers - her clothes, her shoes, and her unicorn necklace - and locked them in a plastic bin. Then, wrapped in a hideous mud-brown and blaze-orange striped jumpsuit, they had led her to a cell in a dimly lit hallway and shoved her inside.

She staggered to the bunk bed and settled down in the bottom bunk, trying not to hear the cell door as it locked firmly behind her with a solemn-sounding clank. Sleep. That was all that mattered now. She curled on her side, propping her broken arm on the thin pillow, and tried to relax.

The garish jumpsuit was actually quite comfortable. Unfortunately, the small bunk built into the wall of her cell seemed to be padded with the same concrete that formed the walls. Between the hard, narrow mattress, the throbbing of her broken arm, and the ratcheting snore of her top-bunk cellmate, things were not restful in the slightest.

Morning arrived with the glare of fluorescent lights at six AM sharp. "Rise and shine, ladies," a CO bellowed, rattling cell doors as she sauntered past them. "Let's go!"

Jackie's bunkmate hopped lithely to the floor, rolling her neck as she sauntered over to the sink. With a cupped hand, she got herself a drink from the stainless-steel sink. She turned back to the bunk, humming cheerfully to herself, and froze as she saw Jackie curled in the bottom recess of the bed.

The girl's eyes flicked to her brown-and-orange jumpsuit. "Didn't know I had a new cellie," she said uneasily.

Jackie swallowed hard, unsure of what to say. "I, um...just got here last night," she explained. "You were asleep."

"Figures." The girl considered her for a moment, realized she was no threat, and stuck a red-and-white striped arm out to Jackie. "My name's Taylor. Oh!" she gasped, as Jackie eased herself to a sitting position and winced as muscles stiff from the Robin-Rogue Fun Run protested the movement. "Your arm!"

"It's okay," Jackie lied, pain lancing through her arm.

Taylor shook her head. "You keep that arm still. Broken bones hurt. Believe me, I know." She pulled her fingers through her long brown hair, gently working out the tangles as she talked. "So who did it? Cops?"

Jackie cleared her throat, uncomfortably remembering her abortive attempt at escape. "Robin," she said in a small voice.

"Robin? Like, _the_ Robin?" Taylor whistled, impressed. "Is he cute?"

"I, uh, didn't notice," Jackie mumbled.

"Probably too busy protecting your boss," Taylor nodded, ferreting a tight tangled knot out of her hair with deft fingertips. "I thought about being a henchgirl, but the costumes all looked so silly. No offense," she said hastily.

"No, none taken," Jackie said automatically. "How'd you know I was a henchgirl?"

"Your stripes. The jumpsuit," she clarified at Jackie's blank look. "Brown and orange is for anyone who hangs out with rogues. They sort everyone by stripes here. Black-and-white is for the small fry - y'know, the prostitutes, the shoplifters, the potheads. Red-and-white is the next level up, murderers, rapists, that kind of stuff. Orange-and-white means trouble. Those are the ones that are crazy enough to attack staff. You see orange on someone, you watch out."

Jackie glanced down at the orange stripes covering her own jumpsuit, then at the red-and-white ones covering Taylor's. From the sudden closed look on the girl's face, it would probably not be the smartest idea to inquire what exactly had landed her behind bars.

"Thanks for telling me," she said, raking her hand through her own hair.

"No prob," Taylor said, pulling her hair into a ponytail with something that looked like a sliced-off segment of a tube sock. "So who's your boss?"

"The Riddler," Jackie said.

"Yeah?" Taylor blinked, processing this information. "Must be fun, working for one of the big names."

"Yeah. Right up until the bats show up," Jackie said, giving up on her hair.

"I hear that."

The cell doors swung open and the short corridor filled with women chattering amiably with one another. "C'mon," Taylor offered. "Breakfast time. Cellies got to stick together, right?"

"Right," Jackie agreed, limping after her.

Breakfast was barely deserving of the term 'food'. Powdered reconstituted scrambled eggs lay in a liquidy heap next to a greasy slice of bologna. Water in a paper cup and a slice of margarine-smeared bread completed the feast.

Jackie poked miserably at the food. Taylor and the two women seated across from them laughed. "Not quite what you're used to, huh?" the large latino woman to the left said, tearing her bologna into bite-sized pieces.

"No," Jackie agreed, taking a tentative bite of her bread.

"Least you won't have to eat it long. They don't keep you types here anymore," she went on, waving an explanatory hand at Jackie's brown-and-orange jumpsuit. "Not since those last three broke out."

"So where do they keep...my type?" Jackie asked.

"Stonegate. Where else?" the woman shrugged, taking a bite of egg.

"Is it your first time? It is, isn't it? Who do you work for?" The other woman, a wiry little thing with a fluffy crest of bright brown curls, looked eagerly at Jackie. "It must be really good, being a henchgirl. Do you get to -"

"Jennifer," Taylor interrupted. "Ease up."

Jennifer pouted, shoving the too-long sleeves of her orange-and-white jumpsuit back up above her elbows to reveal heavily tattooed arms. A skewed portrait of an infant was wrapped around one forearm, while the other bore a cryptic jumble of numbers and letters. "I was only asking. I coulda been a henchgirl, you know. The Scarecrow almost hired me," she said proudly.

"He did?" Jackie asked dubiously.

"You calling me a liar?" Jennifer demanded.

"No, I just...he doesn't like people that much."

"Well, he wasn't that excited about it or anything, but I talked myself up to him, you know? And he said he could probably find a use for me in his lab."

"Oh. I see," Jackie said, realizing that the job description for the position offered by Crane was probably 'Guinea Pig' rather than 'Henchgirl'.

"Yeah. So which one _do_ you work for?" Jennifer pressed.

"The Riddler," Jackie said, trying to maneuver a piece of wobbly egg onto her fork.

The latino woman snorted. "You too, huh?"

Jackie didn't sigh, though she desperately wanted to. One of these days people would get tired of pointing out to her that she was just the latest link in the seemingly endless chain of Eddie's henchgirls. "Yeah. Me too," she said shortly, forking the egg into her mouth.

"You friends with those other three?" she asked abruptly. "Delilah and the other two?"

"Who?" Jackie said, trying to decide whether the bologna was safe to eat. "Oh, them. Not exactly. After they broke out of here, Delilah tried to shoot me in the head."

"That girl is disrespectful," the woman intoned.

"Did she sass you, Rose?" Taylor asked eagerly.

"Nah, not me. She called one of the hacks a pig and blamed someone else when the hack turned around. Good thing for them they broke out. Wasn't going to be too much longer before they made the wrong person angry." Rose took another dainty bite of her egg. "They ever show up back here, the hacks are gonna have a lot to say to them. Made 'em look pretty stupid, those three, sneaking out like that. So now you henches get moved after a day or two so you don't get past 'em like they did."

"Baker?" Jackie twitched nervously and turned around to see a slender hard-faced woman in a blue uniform standing directly behind her, arms folded.

"That's me," Jackie mumbled.

"Here." The woman held out a small paper cup. Two pills rattled around inside it. Jackie recognized them as her beloved, wonderful painkillers and immediately gulped them down. "Good. Come with me."

Jackie eyed her breakfast, debating whether she wanted to protest being pulled away from it, and slowly got to her feet.

"Good luck, kid," Rose said.

"When you get to Stonegate, say hi to Tricia for me!" Taylor called, folding a piece of buttered bread neatly in half before shoving it in her mouth.

The woman in the uniform shooed Jackie in front of her. Head held high, trying to hide the spasms of terror shaking her body, Jackie padded out of the cafeteria.

(_to be continued_)


	5. Rehoming

Jackie flopped across the short wooden table, resting her head on her outstretched good arm. With the tips of her fingers, she awkwardly yanked a section of her tangled hair over her eyes to shield them against the flickering of the fluorescent light above her. She shifted her hips, trying to get comfortable on the ancient wooden chair. As she moved, the chain attached to the shackle around her ankle jingled on the cold concrete floor.

Contrary to what the breakfast club had told her, she hadn't been immediately deported to Stonegate. Instead, she'd been led to this small, windowless room, parked on this godforsaken chair and told to stay put.

The following hours had been filled with a parade of visitors. Cops, used to interrogating devious suspects for hours to get confessions, were pleasantly surprised when Jackie agreeably admitted to everything from the armed robbery at the convention to the parking tickets that she'd never paid. A cafeteria attendant with a greasy hairnet brought her a styrofoam clamshell container with a dry bologna sandwich and a carelessly halved apple. A nurse had brought her another round of painkillers. She vaguely recalled the medication orders being for once every eight hours, not every four, but she was hardly going to argue with anyone offering her any kind of respite from this nightmare.

There was no clock in this room, but she was fairly certain that it was somewhere around suppertime. No one had been in to see her for what seemed like hours. Maybe they'd forgotten her. Well, there was certainly time enough to get some rest in. She nestled against the hard wooden table and did her best to imagine that she was in a soft, pillowy bed underneath a heap of toasty blankets.

The door cha-chunged open again. "Jacqueline Baker?"

"Jackie," she corrected automatically, not moving from her makeshift resting place. The urge to sleep filled her head like a hot, cottony cloud. She cuddled down closer into her arm, wishing the man would just go away.

"Mmm," the man said absently, seating himself across from her. Paper rustled. Jackie slitted one eye and saw a stack of folders six inches thick placed a few inches from the hair flopped carelessly over her nose. "Would you mind sitting up?"

"Yes," Jackie said.

There was a moment of silence.

"Well?"

"I would mind sitting up. I'm tired."

"This won't take long. Up, please."

Jackie dragged herself upright with uncooperative muscles and lounged back in the chair, thudding heavily against the chair back. Suddenly, she was grateful for the four-inch bolts attaching her chair to the floor. She could have fallen, and the floor looked so far away...

No. That was the medication. _Get it together_, she yelled at herself inside her head.

"So...Jackie," the cheerful bearded man across the table said, "tell me about yourself."

"Um...not much to tell, really," she mumbled.

"You know why you're here, don't you?"

She sighed. "Yeah. Because I got caught."

"Could you tell me a little more about that?"

"I don't want to," she said, an embarrassed blush fighting through the haze of her painkillers.

"Well, what shall we talk about then? How about the Riddler?"

"Eddie?" Jackie glanced up. "How is he?"

"I wouldn't know. They've taken him to Arkham Asylum."

Jackie sighed and sank a little lower in her chair. Arkham. She'd known that he'd probably gone there, but hearing it made it seem more final, somehow.

"You seem upset."

"Well, yeah," Jackie agreed.

"Why is that?"

"Because Arkham's bad."

"What makes it bad?"

Jackie stared at him. Aside from Eddie's extreme dislike of the place - if she recalled correctly, he'd rather be shot than go back - what Gothamite didn't loathe and fear the building that housed so many viciously violent supercriminals? "It's Arkham," she explained, slowly and carefully, like a parent explaining to a toddler that sticking forks in the toaster is a very bad idea.

"I see." He made a note on his legal pad. "All right. I understand that you live with the Riddler?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Oh. Um...five months, I think?" she said, trying to remember back. Days of the week and calendar dates didn't mean too much when your day job didn't involve an actual job. "It depends on when you start counting, I guess."

"And what made you move in with the Riddler?"

Jackie stiffened. She wasn't upset by the implication that she'd pursued him. (In fact, she _had_ pursued him, right across the city with a fire extinguisher in one hand and a blaze of fury in her heart.) No, the thing that caught her attention was the sneering, dismissive spin on the word 'Riddler', as if Eddie was no better than a dead mouse on the kitchen floor.

"I had nowhere else to go and he _very kindly_ took me in," she said coldly.

"Indeed, how very _kind_ of him," the man repeated. "And is he still _kind_ to you? Did he promise you money and pretty clothes? Did he tell you that everything would be alright as long as you never left him?"

She glared at him through bloodshot eyes as all of her life's recent irritations built up into one unstoppable force. "No, he held me in a deathtrap until I promised not to run away," she snarled. His pen flew over the legal pad. "That was a _joke_," she said, narrowing her eyes at him.

"It wasn't a very funny one," he said absently, finishing his sentence with a flourish.

"Well, I'm not working for the _Joker_, am I?" She fought down an urge to stick her tongue out at him and settled back in her chair, wincing as her arm began to throb gently. She took a deep breath to calm herself down. Losing her temper wouldn't help anybody. Then, with a small smile on her face, she volunteered "**Joker did sit it up**_**.**__" _

"Sit what up?" the man asked, peering at her over his glasses.

Oooh, this was fun. She thought for a moment. "**Hiding it onto you**."

The pen clattered to the table as the man frantically patted himself down. Finding nothing, he scowled at Jackie and picked his pen back up. "That was also not very funny," he informed her stiffly.

"It was pretty funny from this chair," Jackie said, smiling cheerfully at him.

"You don't care much for authority, do you?" he asked flatly.

"Is there a particular authority you think I should care for?"

"I think you should have a care about what you say to me," he explained grimly. "Cooperation would really be in your best interest."

The pain in her arm began to slowly and steadily crescendo upward. "Fine. What do you want?" she asked, focusing more on what was happening inside her cast than what was going on across the table.

"What did the Riddler do to get you to live with him?" he spelled out, slowly, patiently, and with a spark of irritation burning in his eyes.

"He said yes," Jackie shrugged. "I told you, I had nowhere else to go, and I knew I'd be safe with him."

"Safe?" He raised an eyebrow. "Safe. The man brought you to a party and ordered you to throw Robin into an electrified puzzle trap - "

"He did not! You weren't there, you don't know." Jackie shoved her hair out of her eyes with her good hand and breathed a short, sharp sigh. "You didn't see how brutal he was. He wouldn't stop hitting him and somebody had to do _something_."

"And you volunteered?"

"I didn't know the trap was there," she said defensively.

"Of course you didn't." The man patted her arm condescendingly. Of course, he chose to pat her _bad_ arm, which meant that it took an extreme amount of willpower to not immediately punch him in the face. She bit her lip and wheezed, trying to will away the starbursts of colored pain exploding in front of her eyes.

"If you're quite through with the dramatics," the man interrupted, "we have some more things to discuss. I need you to tell me everything that you've done with the Riddler."

"Everything?" Jackie said, eyes watering.

"Everything."

"And if I refuse?"

He smiled at her - a friendly, professional smile under his friendly, professional mustache. "The nurse is out there with your medication," he said pleasantly. "I can't allow her to come in until we're finished."

"**Abduct a roofing husky**! Fine." She took a deep breath. "He burned my house down, okay? We were playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey and the fire extinguisher was full of kerosene and then Jervis wanted won tons but Crane was pissy about the slippers and Harley put pretzels in my bra and Question almost shot me in the head and then Eddie broke everyone out of Arkham and we went to the beach and then we robbed the convention and now I'm here. End of story." The man was staring at her, one eyebrow raised. "What?" she snapped.

"Nothing," he said, shuffling his notes back into their folders. "You'll be moved shortly." And with that, he strode out of the room, locking it firmly behind him.

Jackie sighed and gently thumped her forehead back onto the table, doing her best to appreciate her last few minutes in a relatively minimum-security facility and dreading the sound of the key in the lock.

* * *

Eddie sprawled on his narrow bed and glared at the closed door of his cell. His ankle, which had been shoved into a small elastic support, twinged painfully with every beat of his heart.

They hadn't kept him in the hospital wing for very long. Two days of observation was long enough for them to determine that he'd survive on his own, so he'd been dumped back in his old cell like an unwanted toy being thrown into a toybox.

Well, he wasn't going to stay for long. Not this time. Not when they were taking Jackie who-knew-where. If he was going to break her out of anywhere, he'd much prefer to do it when she was still incarcerated in a relatively low-security place rather than Stonegate.

And yes, his ankle was going to slow him down. On the other hand, they wouldn't be expecting him to make an escape attempt with such an obvious handicap. The old bunched-up-blankets-in-place-of-himself trick would fool them for a few hours - more than enough time to get him safely home.

A night guard strode down the hallway, flashing his light into each cell and illuminating the inhabitants. Eddie shut his eyes and feigned sleep as the guard's light flicked over him. Then, when he was sure the man had gone, he rolled out of bed and slipped his hand under the mattress. A lockpick dropped into his searching fingers.

He took a moment to carefully rumple the blankets so that it would appear that he'd tucked himself completely under them. After another quick glance to ensure that the coast was clear, he picked the lock on his cell and slipped out of the door, closing it as slowly and gently as he could. Then, alert for any sign of an approaching guard, he limped down the hallway, biting his lip to keep from gasping as his weight rested on his injured foot. The halls were empty. He hobbled to the nearest set of stairs and began the long, painful trek to the lobby.

Four flights down with a sprained ankle was painful and exhausting. By the time he reached the lobby doors, sweat had curled his hair into damp little twists and gathered in moist patches at the neck and armpits of his jumpsuit.

He opened the lobby door a tiny, tiny bit and peeked out. No-one was there. Even the night receptionist had deserted his post. Eddie hurried into the lobby and limped determinedly toward the huge, inviting lobby doors.

One of the doors began to open. Eddie stopped dead in his tracks, horrified, and searched for a hiding spot. There - a statue of Elizabeth Arkham, seated on a bench, skirts decorously spread to make an Eddie-sized shield. He flung himself behind it, squeezing himself tightly between the cold bronze of the statue and the rough stone of the wall. His head ducked safely out of sight just as Batman appeared, dragging the Joker inside by the back of the neck.

"Easy on the suit, Bats," the Joker wheezed as his toes scrabbled hastily on the linoleum. Eddie straightened up ever so slightly so that he could peer through the small peephole formed by the statue's arm and side. Batman, with a stony look on his face, raised the Joker in the air and dropped him flat on his feet, marching him deeper into the asylum without stopping to let him get his balance. Eddie winced slightly as he saw that the clown's purple suit was shredded from neck to heels, as if he'd been bounced around inside a giant cheese grater. Maybe he had. Nothing was impossible when it involved the Joker.

Robin followed behind them, an unconscious and equally torn-up Harley Quinn dangling from his shoulder.

A small army of orderlies burst out of the hallway, followed closely by the night receptionist. Batman silently held the Joker out to them like a housewife disposing of a dead rat. "Thanks, Batman. We've got him," one said, grabbing the Joker's arm in an iron grip.

"I'll take her," another volunteered, catching Harley as Robin lowered her off of his back.

Eddie held his breath as the vigilantes turned to leave. Batman flicked open a panel on the back of his glove and tapped a few buttons, noting the result with a slightly grimmer set to his lips as he moved toward the door. Heart pounding in his ears, Eddie clung to the statue and did his best not to make a sound. A black beetle crawled idly up the statue's back. He leaned away from it ever so slightly, muscles screaming protests as he moved. Just a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes and they'd be gone -

His pained yelp reverberated through the air as a black-gloved hand grabbed him by the throat and yanked him into the lobby. Batman glared down at him and dragged him across the freshly waxed floor to the cluster of orderlies frisking the Joker. "You can take this one, too," he graveled, shoving the Riddler at the only orderly who didn't have nervous hands pressed against the Joker or his henchgirl. "This time, try to keep him in his cell."

The orderly seized his arm. "We will, Batman. I promise." The orderly pinned him with a terrifyingly intense scowl that promised retribution by the truckload for his impudence in sneaking out. The last time he'd seen that look on anyone's face, he'd spent the next month chained to the bed in a cell with electrified doors.

"Breaking curfew, Eddie? Naughty, naughty," the Joker chided, somehow managing to still look dangerous even when clad only in his smiley-face boxers. Batman turned on his heel and strode out of the building. "What, no good-night kiss?" the clown called at the receding cape. His only answer was the resounding slam of the door.

"Come on," the orderly snapped, dragging Eddie away by the arm. "I know just what to do with you."

Eddie did his best to keep his feet beneath him as he was propelled down the hallway. Escape plans and bribery plots sparked across his brain, each one frantically discarded as useless in his present situation. Well, anything was worth a shot now, right? They were alone in a service hallway, with no troublesome witnesses to spoil anything.

"Ten grand if you let me go," Eddie offered.

The mouth is one of the most sensitive areas of the human body. The amount of pain experienced when someone is, say, punched squarely in the teeth, is astonishingly great.

Eddie spat blood from his split lip and tried again. "Twenty?"

Being knocked unconscious, on the other hand, doesn't hurt at all. Eddie's last thought before he hit the floor was "not again".

* * *

Jackie spent the next few days laying listlessly on her bunk. Really, there wasn't much else to do in the little solitary holding cells other than lay there or get up and pace, and with her broken arm throwing her off balance combined with her loose, flappy sandals, she didn't think she could effectively pace without knocking herself silly on the floor.

A guard clanked a set of cuffs against the bars. "Rise and shine, Baker," she said. "You're going to your new home."

Jackie got to her feet and extended her hands, biting back a yelp as the icy cold metal clicked around the bare skin of her right wrist. The other cuff clipped - just barely - around the wrist of her cast. The guard rolled the door open and led Jackie out into the cold, drafty hallway. "Where am I going?"

"Dunno," the guard shrugged. "Does it matter?"

"I guess not," Jackie sighed. At least maybe at Stonegate she'd get to leave the cell every now and again. Hooray.

After a few rounds of paperwork, they loaded her into the back of a police cruiser and set off. Jackie stared with eager eyes at the outside world. Cars! People! Little kids riding in strollers! Oh, she'd missed seeing it all, and she hadn't even been in jail for a week. She didn't want to think about how long it would be before she saw it all again.

At least she wasn't going far. If she was going outside the city, they would have put her on a bus or an airplane. She'd never been anywhere near Stonegate, but she'd certainly heard stories about how awful it was. Well, she'd heard stories about how awful most prisons were...well, okay, so she'd seen an episode or two of Oz, but that was more than enough to convince her that it would not be a good time.

They were winding their way through a bleak and barren landscape. Funny, she'd thought that the prison was closer to the city...And then she saw something that made her heart leap.

A huge iron gate arched over the road, with the words 'Arkham Asylum' picked out in forbidding metal letters. "I'm going to _Arkham_?" Jackie yelped.

"Yeah. Where'd ya think you were going?" a cop from the front seat snickered.

"But. Stonegate. I'm supposed to go to Stonegate," Jackie stammered, adrenaline fizzing in her veins.

The cop in the passenger seat twisted slightly so that he could look her in the eyes. "Not with your psych profile, you're not."

"I'm not crazy!" she protested.

"Sure you aren't." The cop turned away to look out of the windshield.

They thought she was crazy? Crazy enough to be sent to Arkham? Why on earth...oh. Oh, that guy with the beard. Maybe calling him an idiot in several flavors of anagram hadn't been such a good idea. Now she was going to Arkham, where the worst of the worst were housed. Arkham, where ethics went to die. She'd be trapped in Arkham, locked up with the Joker, and the Scarecrow, and -

And _Eddie_!

The cop car pulled to a stop in front of the massive brick building. "Welcome home," one cop said cheerfully, sliding out of the car.

They pulled Jackie out and walked her up the steps. "I'm really going to Arkham?" she asked tremulously.

"Yeah." The cops tensed, ready for a last-second escape attempt or a plaster-covered arm swinging at their heads.

Instead, Jackie did a happy little jig, nearly tripping on her sandals. "_Fantastic_!"

* * *

_Author's Note: Eddie's experiences with electrified doors and such were taken from the Batman: the Animated Series episode 'Lock-Up'. Eddie and Jackie's adventures will continue in 'The Big House'. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it!  
_


End file.
